The Environmental Protection Agency cut corners in its effort to regulate greenhouse gases but met rulemaking requirements, a federal watchdog found. The EPA, disagreeing strongly, countered the science
-- and the case for action --- was unquestioned.

This would be kind of funny, if it weren't terrible. The Daily Caller claimed on Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency is going to have to hire 230,000 new employees just to put new climate rules in place. And then others, including Fox News, repeated it, as Media Matters highlights today.

The problem is not only the fact that the number is, uh, inconceivable, given that the EPA currently only employs 17,000 people. But the story actually managed to pull that number from a court filing about what the EPA is trying to avoid.

The Republican recipe is familiar: cherry-pick the facts and evidence; release just enough to the media without showing the whole picture; create a bubble of media coverage from conservative news outlets; use congressional hearings like the set of a TV show. It sure looks real, so it must be real, right? But the facts keep getting in the way.

Company estimates that 16% of its electricity needs will be met in the current financial year by burning sewage flakes

They look like instant coffee granules, but they are in fact sewage flakes - a highly combustible new renewable form of fuel that burns like woodchip and is being used for the first time to generate electricity for Britain's largest water and sewerage company.

Based on the prebuttal items appearing this week in the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller, and U.S. News and World Report, the Bloomberg story focuses on alleged malfeasance and/or fraud and/or bad behavior by the conglomerate Koch Industries.

Utility crews have found a total of eight natural gas leaks in the north Seattle neighborhood where a home exploded, injuring two residents in a two-alarm fire. Meanwhile, Kentucky Tea Party Sen.
Rand Paul holds up a gas pipeline safety bill even as a pipeline rupture scares residents of his state.

The historic removal of Elwha Dam is easily watched even by viewers in wheelchairs, on a new overlook trail opened by the Clallam County. And if you don't even want to get your shoes dirty, you can watch online, from six webcams.

The first-ever Affordability Contest at the 2011 Solar Decathlon concluded yesterday with two teams tied for first place, demonstrating that innovative technology doesn't have to be expensive.

The two teams - Parsons The New School for Design and Stevens Institute of Technology and Purdue University - built their homes for less than $250,000 each, which includes materials, labor and construction equipment as evaluated by a professional cost estimator. Parsons New School and Stevens' Empowerhouse cost less than $230,000, and Purdue's INhome cost just under the $250,000 cap. Winners were announced Tuesday at a ceremony in the solar village.

"The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.
...
"Eventually it'll become damned clear that the Earth is warming..." [said retired Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker]."

Apparently the world's engineers are getting sick of being told that cutting emissions is an engineering problem. Eleven of the biggest engineering organizations have released a joint statement saying, in effect, "You want carbon cuts? We can give you carbon cuts. Just say the word, smart guy."

We already have all the tech necessary to cut emissions 85 percent by 2050, say the engineers. What we don't have is support from governments --- laws that prioritize carbon reduction, and funding to put the technology into action.

The final days of rancorous public debate over a $7 billion oil pipeline that would snake from Canada through the midsection of the United States have taken on an unexpected urgency this week, as the economic and environmental stakes of the massive project snap into focus at a time of festering anxiety about the nation's future.

Environmentalists are blaming climate change for the unprecedented massive monsoon rains in Pakistan, which so far this year have affected eight million people, claiming 350 lives and damaging 1.3 million homes.

[T]he coal industry as we know it today is a dead man walking. All the high-quality, easy-to-get coal is gone, and what’s left is increasingly expensive and difficult to mine.

In the last couple of decades, coal operators have dealt with this by shifting to cheap but highly destructive ways of getting coal out of the ground, such as blasting away the mountains above the coal with explosives (a practice known as mountaintop-removal mining).

But now the remaining coal seams are so deeply buried and so thin that even that isn’t working anymore. As the AP story points out, the U.S. Department of Energy projects that in a little more than three years, the amount of coal mined in Appalachia will be just half of what it was in 2008. After that, the downward spiral will continue. There is no magic remedy, no quick fix: when the coal is gone, it’s gone.